The Nowhere Places
by Susan LeBlanc
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Pub Date 10 Sep 2024 | Archive Date 8 Oct 2024
Nimbus Publishing | Vagrant Press
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Description
An incisive, skilful debut historical novel tracing the lives of a middle-aged woman and a teenaged girl through one pivotal year (1979-80) in North End Halifax.
It's 1979, and June has raised her son, Gerald, into adulthood as an unwed mother. She is in middle life now, sandwiched between Gerald—who is developmentally disabled and still lives in the family Hydrostone rowhouse—and her aging mother, Margie. When Gerald goes missing, it throws the family into chaos, leaving June shaken and open to the advances of a long-ago ex who's back in Halifax and looking to reunite.
Teenaged Lulu, too, worries about Gerald's absence from the pharmacy where she works. Lulu is reckoning with life as a girl transitioning into womanhood in this buttoned-up, patriarchal city. Her parents' marriage is on the rocks, as is her relationship with her best friend now that they've started high school. Lulu will never be cool, will always be threatened by the rough boys who live in her neighbourhood, will always live in a body that feels unwieldy and undesirable.
The Nowhere Places puts the secret stories of girlhood and womanhood—sexual violence, accidental pregnancy, shame, ambition, and yearning—centre stage, as they occur in the wild insecurity and shifting sands of Lulu's teenage life, and the powerful, decisive growth of June's middle age.
Lulu and June, though divided by decades, are both learning who they are and who they belong to—and what they might be capable of in a world still deeply unfair to women. And both find their solid foundations in their patched-together families, and the safe joy of female friends.
Moving, incisive, and set in a palpably real slice of Halifax, The Nowhere Places is a startlingly skilful debut novel—"a made-in-Halifax Lives of Girls and Women" (Carol Bruneau).
Advance Praise
“A made-in-Halifax Lives of Girls and Women, Susan LeBlanc’s The Nowhere Places is the novel I’ve been longing to read most if not all of my adult life. This powerful debut is a profoundly moving story about daring to be different in the small, whitewashed city my generation knew growing up—the Halifax of the 1970s as riven by entrenched rivalries as it was (and still is) sustained by tightly-knit families and communities. A city where the boundaries between its working-class North and affluent South End seemed impenetrable, a city where those of modest means lived in quiet desperation chafing against the desire for more. Against this milieu, a time and place as stifling as it was nurturing, LeBlanc’s exquisitely drawn girls and women strive for selfhood, dare to make lives that are fully their own. Just as Alice Munro’s book was a revelation back in those days, so too is LeBlanc’s: I cannot think of a more vivid, truthful portrait of ourselves or of this era and place. Gutting, uplifting, propulsive, The Nowhere Places is a triumph. I love this book.”
–Carol Bruneau, award-winning author of Threshold and Brighten the Corner Where You Are
“In a loving and clear-eyed depiction of North End Halifax at the turn of the 1980s, Susan LeBlanc’s The Nowhere Places immerses us in a time and setting that feels both minutely and beautifully particular, yet deeply relatable and free from the kitsch and sentimentality of nostalgia. LeBlanc writes her characters—both the sensitive, teenaged Lulu, the weary single mother June, and a myriad of memorable, sharply drawn secondary characters—with nuance, compassion, and a telescopic view of the world as it was then that is grounded in the one we know now. LeBlanc’s hilariously funny yet heartbreakingly sad story reflects the tenderness and grit of David Adam’s Richards’s Nights Below Station Street or Heather O’Neill’sLullabies for Little Criminals. It offers a stirring and deeply satisfying story of a community that will keep you turning the page.”
–Becca Babcock, author of Some There Are Fearless
“The Nowhere Places by Susan LeBlanc offers an intriguing glimpse into the lives of two characters living in North End Halifax in the late 1970s. A story that explores the consequences of secrets held close to the heart—the guilt, the shame, and even the regret when those closely held secrets are eventually exposed. Told with compassion and a deep understanding of what motivates her characters, LeBlanc eases the reader through the ripple effect of those touched by the lives of others. A moving portrayal of the courage and the struggle to find one’s own place in the world, no matter what age. A story that tugs gently at the heart.”
–Laura Best, author of Good Mothers Don’t
“Susan LeBlanc has given us a portrait of North End Halifax that is both graceful and gritty. This gentle, understated novel draws us intimately into the lives of ordinary people, with all the love, worries, triumphs, and losses of ordinary lives. I found myself caring very much about them all, especially loving their courage as they try, over and over again, to do the right thing.”
–Anne Bishop, author of Under the Bridge
Available Editions
EDITION | Other Format |
ISBN | 9781774713280 |
PRICE | CA$24.95 (CAD) |
PAGES | 302 |